Ed Heslam (guitar)
Jean Altshuler (harp)

Bleckell Murry Neet is an album of Cumbrian music played on the guitar and harp. Ed Heslam has a background in classical guitar playing, as a soloist and in various ensembles, while Jean Altshuler has built a career as an orchestral harpist and, more recently, playing the lever harp in chamber music. For this album, Jean has returned to the pedal harp, giving a more resonant sound which perfectly complements the rich tone of the Carrillo guitar, as well as allowing more scope in arranging the music.
 
The content represents a snapshot of musical themes which would have been familiar to the people of Cumberland and Westmorland during the late 18th and 19th centuries. Bleckell Murry Neet carries with it the history of a bygone era. It alludes to a time when dialect was widely spoken (and sung) in Cumberland and Westmorland; to a period when everyday people danced with an energy and passion that is now hard to imagine and to an era when the town of Whitehaven was at the centre of trade and communications, while central Lakeland was merely an obscure backwater. The album consists of a series of melodies gleaned from the manuscripts of Cumbrian musicians. These old tunes carry the hint of stories of love lost, of love yearned for and of love found; they allude to tales of the Border Reivers and stories of the corruption and electoral fraud of the rich landed gentry who often exerted a malign control over the region and its people.
 
Bleckell Murry Neet is not an attempt to recreate the sound of the past. The Lakeland fiddle-playing tradition died out at the beginning of the twentieth century and, with the demolition of the White Ox pub (scene of the party mentioned in the title track) in 1904, the ballads of Robert Anderson became a vague and distant memory forgotten to all but a few. The melodies do, however, live on in this album within new musical forms. Heslam and Altshuler are respectful of the past, but they are not in thrall to it. They take the view that musical traditions are not fixed and static and, while the basic tunes continue to be played, the overall context moves on with the times. This is just as it was back in the 1840s when John Rook of Waverton took up his pipes and his violin and created his own variations on the well-known melodies of the period.